


Domestic

by bramblePatch



Series: Heritage [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff, Gen, House Cleaning, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-05
Updated: 2011-04-05
Packaged: 2017-10-17 14:59:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/178075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bramblePatch/pseuds/bramblePatch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It feels as if every bit of cleaning Rose does imposes a bit of order on her own mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Domestic

**Author's Note:**

> Whoa, Rose's story for this series was a lot harder to write than John's. I'm pretty sure I won't take so long on Dave or Jade.

Rose hardly realizes, at first, what she's doing.

It starts small. Rose dislikes feeling useless and in the way, but there's no question of her joining in the strife training that some of her friends have taken up in their spare time - in a show of good faith, she has emptied her specibus of all but the most mundane of needles, and still she knows that the idea of her fighting makes the others nervous. Nor can she use the alchemiters without someone turning up to watch, and as little as she likes the feeling of being watched - she gets enough of that in her sleep, these days - she can't really blame them. No one's really sure how to tell whether she's really returned to her old self, not even her. Anyway, it's not as if she's the only one receiving such treatment; although in joining their sessions the recent spate of troll-on-troll murder was undone, it will be a long time before some of them regain the trust of the group. Rose supposes that she should be grateful that no one feels it necessary to keep her drugged or under guard, as Gamzee and Eridan are.

So, feeling a little out of place, she starts to absentmindedly straighten up. The detritus of sixteen teenagers builds up quickly if left unchecked, especially in a setting with no closets or proper beds to shove things into or under. It only seems natural, to her, to leave people's things neatly stacked outside their doors when she finds them lying around.

 

Rose is surprised by the level of disorder in which her friends happily exist.

It doesn't occur to her that picking up after people is such a strange thing for her to be doing until Karkat starts referring to her as the "gogdamn tidiness fairy." Even if his words are harsh, though, he doesn't seem upset; in fact, she doesn't think she's ever seen the troll more pleased than when he sees her hauling the horn pile out of the main computer lab. Well, after he gets over the near heart attack of hearing the inevitable muffled honks that result from moving the pile, at least.

Some of the other trolls' reactions are a little harder to interpret: Equius watches her warily, as if not certain whether it's Rose's place to pick up after him. Vriska tries to convince her that having things lying around to trip over is good for Tavros. And Kanaya, in what Rose can only assume is an attempt at human-style friendly passive aggression, presents her with a french maid's dress. At least, she hopes the troll isn't aware of the fetishistic connotations of the outfit.

For her part, it feels as if every bit of cleaning up she does imposes a bit more order on her own mind. Perhaps this isn't so surprising; at the Lalonde home, a mess implied that there was something seriously wrong. The year before, Mom had come down with a case of the flu that had put her out of commission for nearly a week; by the third day, Rose had begun to pick up the slack on house-cleaning, simply because despite her scorn for her mother's displays of domesticity, allowing dust and muddy footprints and dirty dishes to build up had simply felt wrong.

A similar feeling is definitely in effect here, too. The others, human and troll alike, show a tendency to leave their things lying around in public spaces which is, honestly, quite alien to Rose. She'd thought that her own room was a mess - she'd only cleaned it as an insincere acknowledgment of the example her mother set - until she had a chance to see her friends' bedrooms. Not that she does much about the others' rooms - she can, at least, confine her cleaning to public spaces, even if she's not sure how Dave manages to make it from one side of the space he's claimed to the other without tripping and breaking his neck several times over.

 

An unexpected benefit is that it is very hard to remain isolated and standoffish when seeking people out to return their belongings.

John's recent experiments with cooking seem to have generated an impossible number of dirty dishes, many of which are left lying around in the least likely places, and from time to time Rose does a sweep and brings a stack of them back to his makeshift kitchen. She washes them as he cooks, and while neither of them is quite ready yet to discuss their respective parents' deaths, the empty spaces in the conversation don't seem so obtrusive when they're both working. When she finishes and turns to go, he leaves his work to hurry over and enfold her in a hug, which she allows herself to enjoy for a long moment, before a scorched smell reminds both of them that John has left a skillet on the range.

The idea of not leaving his things lying around appears to be completely foreign to Dave. If she needed to, Rose is sure that she could find her paradox brother at any time, simply by following the trail of shitty swords he leaves in his wake. She half-suspects that he's doing it on purpose to aggravate Karkat, not that the troll needs any particular excuse to be aggravated. Rose picks up after him, anyway.

Jade is nearly as bad as the trolls about storing things in piles, although Rose isn't entirely sure when her friend is awake long enough to make such piles. It seems like Jade sleeps more than is normal, although Rose is willing to think that it may be simply that their sleep schedules aren't matching up at the moment. No one's quite sure, anymore, what time of day it would be back on Earth or on Alternia, and most of them simply sleep when they're tired. Normally, Rose avoids going into other people's rooms too much, but when she realizes that the pile of squiddles and manthros she leaves outside of Jade's door has been steadily growing without being retrieved, she sticks her head in to make sure everything's alright. Jade is asleep, a grim smile on her face. Rose begins to move the stuffed animals from the hallway into Jade's room, and as a beam of light from the door falls across her face, the dark-haired girl bolts awake, shouting something incoherant that none-the-less makes the hair at the back of Rose's neck stand on end.

After the first frightening outburst, though, Jade seems almost to collapse in on herself, clutching at her blanket, and Rose moves to her side almost without realizing what she's doing. Hugs do not come particularly naturally to Rose - she has always considered her mother's shows of affection to be insincere and something to be tolerated - and Jade is more accustomed to giving hugs than receiving them, but before either of them really know what is happening Rose has wrapped her arms around her friend, who shakes against her for a long moment before pulling away with a shaky smile.

Neither of them mention it to anyone else.

 

Rose feels a little as if she is becoming her mother, with her constant and largely futile attempts to clean up after everyone. What surprises her is how little this seems to bother her.


End file.
